Handling of Suspicious Mail Raises Questions in Hartford

Published: April 5, 2003

HARTFORD, April 4—
One envelope was empty but bore a threatening message. Another letter contained fine white crumbs. A third held some powdery candy.

All three pieces of suspicious mail turned out to be harmless, but their handling at two post offices here this winter has prompted Senator Joseph I. Lieberman to request a federal review and a union president to file a grievance with the Postal Service.

On Thursday, Senator Lieberman sent a letter to John E. Potter, the postmaster general, requesting a review of whether proper safety protocol was followed in two incidents involving suspicious letters in December and January.

''It's outrageous if established protocols are still being ignored over a year after anthrax attacks sent shock waves through the postal system and resulted in the deaths of two postal employees,'' Mr. Lieberman said in a statement. In 2001, two Washington postal workers died from exposure to anthrax passed through the mail, and three others also died from anthrax exposure, including a 94-year-old woman in Oxford, Conn.

Mr. Lieberman had already contacted Mr. Potter after a Nov. 19 incident at Hartford's main mail-distribution center, where an envelope inscribed with the words ''to anyone who wants anthrax, have a nice day'' was carried by a supervisor from one end of the center to the other, in violation of the containment protocol for suspicious mail. Employees are supposed to leave suspicious mail where it is found.

''He walked through the whole back of the building carrying the letter,'' Sara Jacobs, a window clerk, said today. ''All of us could have gotten sick. It was scary.''

On Dec. 17, the same day Mr. Potter acknowledged receiving Mr. Lieberman's letter on the November incident, a supervisor at a post office in the city's South End called the wrong emergency response team when a letter leaking white crumbs was discovered, said Michael Berghuis, president of Local 147 of the American Postal Workers Union. The union represents 950 workers in a dozen Hartford post offices and four others in surrounding towns.

A two-and-a-half-hour delay ensued before the proper Fire Department crew arrived to discover that the crumbs were a crushed communion wafer, Mr. Berghuis said.

On Jan. 18, a clerk at the main Hartford postal center spilled white powder from a letter on herself, and was told by a supervisor to walk 500 feet through the building to a designated safety office, said Mr. Berghuis, who works at the main Hartford post office. The powder was later found to be candy.

The Hartford postmaster, Chu Falling Star, has acknowledged that the letter with a threatening message was mishandled and that the supervisor was disciplined, said a spokeswoman, Debra Hawkins. But the Postal Service firmly denies any breach of protocol in the other two instances, Ms. Hawkins said.

The postmaster general supports the conclusions reached by Hartford, said Jerry Kreienkamp, a spokesman for the Postal Service in Washington.

Mr. Berghuis said that proper procedures were not followed in the first three incidents and that since January, three more incidents occurred in which an employee with suspicious mail walked through the building. Ms. Hawkins said she was unaware of any further incidents.

The union complained to Senator Lieberman. The senator, a ranking member of the Governmental Affairs Committee, has asked the postmaster general to provide an accounting of what occurred on Dec. 17 and Jan. 18 and how the Postal Service plans to address problems with its handling of suspicious letters.